Sorbent cartridges are commonly designed to hold and store various sorbent materials. The known sorbent cartridges are generally of a fixed sized and pre-determined shape and cannot be re-configured or customized for personalized use once manufactured. In particular, the sorbent cartridges are rigid and do not allow for adjustment and cannot be altered. As such, a user cannot configure an amount of sorbent materials to optimize use of the materials based on a patient condition, for example state of uremia or weight. The lack of customization prevents the possibility of reducing consumable expense because known sorbent cartridges are one-size-fits-all. Existing sorbent cartridges fail to account for patient needs and do not allow for fewer or additional materials to be added or taken away depending on a patient's initial blood chemistry profile or the amounts of each contaminant that need to be removed. Static sorbent configurations also prevent economical disposal and/or recycling as well as regeneration of the sorbent materials.
Larger patients or patients who are more uremic may need greater amounts of particular sorbent materials to properly regenerate dialysate used in sorbent dialysis, such as zirconium phosphate. Often, sorbent cartridges are constructed in a standardized manner so that they may be used in a standardized dialysis machine. This means that each patient receives the same amount of each sorbent material. Standardized sorbent cartridges therefore can either contain too much of a particular sorbent material, adding to waste and driving up costs, or the sorbent cartridge may contain the correct amount for an average patient, meaning the capacity to regenerate dialysate will be exceeded for patients requiring more of the sorbent material. The individual sorbent compartments of the present invention allow for customization of the sorbent cartridge, thus reducing cost and waste.
Therefore, there is a need for a modular system of interchangeable sorbent housings or compartments that can utilize different weights and sizes for storing various sorbent materials of different shapes, weights, and sizes, and allowing for the creation of a customized system with interchangeable modular sorbent configurations customizable to dialysis or patient parameters. There is also a need for a device and system that can be configured to interchangeably fit a system of modular sorbent compartments.
There is also a need for facilitating ease of packaging and shipping using a modular interchangeable system to house sorbent materials. To combat counterfeiting, there is a need for isolating individual vendors from a sorbent manufacturing process wherein specific sorbent materials used for dialysis can be pre-filled separately. There is a need for providing an option for allowing sub-vendors to manufacture sorbent housing or separate assembly line fill production facilities from one another. There is also a need for providing a customized sorbent system wherein different layers of sorbent materials can be used together in sorbent compartments wherein each sorbent compartment is modular and interchangeable. There is also a need for reducing final assembly steps required in preparing a dialysis system for use. There is also a need for pre-filling a component housing sorbent materials at precise quantities to avoid user error.
There is also a need for a modular sorbent cartridge having the features of reduced size and weight necessary for a portable dialysis machine. There is further a need for sorbent modules that allow for easy customization regarding the amount of material within the modules based on the needs of a particular patient or dialysis session.